AT&T and the World Wide Web
William H. Holland
AT&T-BL Technical Manager
I. OVERVIEW:
AT&T is actively pursuing the use of the World-Wide-Web (WWW) to help meet its business goals. AT&T has an emerging presence on the Web, and views this as yet another method to meet its commitment to continually use new technologies to reach our customers. This paper will discuss specific customer support services that AT&T is providing (via the Web). It also discusses some of the concerns AT&T has of the Web.
II. BACKGROUND:
The world of multi-media has been around for some time. However, the ability to have access to this technology at your desktop (local or remote) in a cost effective, seamless, and user friendly manner has been a roadblock. The introduction of the Web technology and the capability to use it to meet new corporate business needs is not only a want, but a requirement to be competitive in the market place. The much talked about "Super Information Highway" has really existed for some time. Users of services such as USENET have long had access to the Internet, and have shared information in a bulletin board electronic communications environment. However, the concept of a user friendly, multi-media, and seamless "windows" environment, is a major advancement.
III. INTERNAL WWW USE:
AT&T is very excited about the existing and potential internal uses of the Web. The capability to access distributed databases in a seamless and user friendly manner from the desktop, has been a need of many financial planners, project planners, management, and executives for a long time. This becomes a fairly simple task when the Web is used in a way that allows these remote databases to be accessed, converted to HTML, and displayed in a window's environment.
In addition to the seamless access to distributed databases, the internal Web can assist in reducing the cost of doing business. Quality is major thrust for AT&T, and the Web technology can play a major role in this area. The use of the Web technology in the ISO9000 qualification process is being done. Generally, the manufacturing sites have had the process repeatability control requirements as a way to track quality. We now have the same tight control requirements on our documentation and software development processes. The Web is an additional tool we have used to begin the ISO qualification for our document control processes. This requires the support of the internal AT&T Business Unit (BU) customers, our Web staff, and many project planners. The result is that an enterprise system for documentation or process control is in progress, and it should be maintainable in a very user friendly and efficient manner.
We also have internal AT&T employees that need to have access to information about the corporation directions and initiatives, as well as stay informed about new products and services. The internal Web can help us distribute, collect information, and make quicker decisions on our AT&T policies and practices. Products and services can also be evaluated earlier in the development stages and modifications made (and re-displayed by on-line video). Therefore, the interval between design requirements and product general availability can be reduced. Some of these initiatives are underway, and the preliminary results look very promising.
IV. CUSTOMER SERVICES:
AT&T a set of services that offers to internal AT&T Business Units (BU) and non-AT&T organizations as follows:
1. Product/Service Advertising (e.g. AT&T BUs, or external organizations)
2. Web Home Page Support (linking, HOME page provisioning)
3. HTML training
4. Document translation/filter support.
5. Web consulting (e.g., overview/use, security)
6. Order to delivery on-line access (in development).
7. Report generation (based on customer criteria)
8. Billing Support (process orders and revenue collection processes).
These services will enable AT&T BUs and other customers to link their existing Web servers to our HOME page, or have us install the pages directly on our external Web server.
V. SOME ISSUES/CONCERNS:
The issue of security is very important, even for the internal Web server uses. Primarily from the view that we need to be assured that information on the internal server cannot be accessed externally, and ensure some information is kept isolated to specific internal organizations. The internal Web service has developed special software and hardware configurations to ensure this requirement is met.
Another area of concern is the issue of determining what information internal users will be able to access externally. There are some Web servers on the external Internet that clearly carry information that is counter to AT&T polices and practices. While it is difficult to selectively detect/block specific information (without some major effort being done), our polices will define penalties when corporate AT&T policy is violated.
The search/index need would be highly desirable, and this is an area we plan to spend some effort.
VI. EXTERNAL WWW USE:
Although AT&T has had significant use of the Web for internal AT&T organizations, we see the use of the external Web as an area that can be leveraged as well. Our URL is http://www.att.com/, and while we have customer value added features and Web unique information, we see this as just the beginning of a new journey. We see new and innovative uses for the Web, and look forward to using these new techniques. Our corporate goal is to leverage this new Web capability to access our existing and new customers. This will facilitate customers in having real time access to existing and new products and services that will meet their needs. We also see this as a way to access other Web sites to determine how AT&T can utilize products and services of other Web sites. Obviously the use of text, graphics, audio, and video in manner that allows customers, suppliers, and employees to take a "joy ride" and browse through the valuable information is a major goal. By doing this, the Web will take the pain of having to know the what, where, and how out of the browsing experience. We see ourselves as partnering with other major Web sites to allow customers to truly have global access though a single interface. We will also be using the Web to measure customer satisfaction and customer needs/wants. We will accomplish this by providing on-line user friendly survey tools. These in turn can be used to help us monitor and improve our product and services on an on-going basis.
VII. CUSTOMER SERVICES:
AT&T offers a set of services to external organizations as well. Although these are the same basic services that were defined in the internal Web section, the emphasis on the deliverable will be different in many cases. Refer to the previous "Customer Services" section for list.
VIII. SOME ISSUES/CONCERNS:
The external Web server, however, does not come without some major areas of concern. The area of security being one of the top issues that needs to be addressed. We need to be assured that the information on the Web is kept secure, as well as the resources that are beyond the Web. AT&T has long been a leader in gateway architectures. We leverage the resources of the Bell Laboratories research [1] team's designs. We then plan, engineer and deploy these as production systems. The Web is outside our AT&T firewall (external gateway), and leverages the value of the firewall protection. We see them (Web server and external gateway) as a combined set of service technologies. In addition we have taken many other precautions to be assured that Web operations that cause security concerns, will be analyzed before we provide them on our server. If we find that a operation is needed that violates our security requirements, we will ensure we offer solutions to customers that will allow their needs to be met. This may require special configuration or code development. We intend to do this as necessary. There are also the critical networking issues, that need to be considered. The growth of the Web on the Internet is estimated to be at about 500GB/month. The growth rate is now about 10%/month. Since the Web has just begun to be seen as a major technology to be used by corporations (many without any links to the Internet), this percentage can easily double or triple in a very short time. It will be critical to manage network resources, and monitor network growth characteristics.
Another issue is the need to find related subjects or topics easily on the Web. Navigation tools and index/searching routine tools will greatly enhance the usability of the Web. These searches will display information that is accessing information globally from Web servers all over the world. This will be accomplished seamlessly, with the customer only viewing the resultant output.
The Web technology will continue to advance, and with that will come other issues that will need to be resolved.
IX. SUMMARY:
AT&T is committed to the Web, and supporting the needs of its customers in its use. We feel this technology will stimulate the "Super Information Highway" direction, and help drive new products and services development and provisioning in new and exciting ways. AT&T plans to be a major contributor to make this happen, and also plans to offer new and innovative capabilities as well. AT&T views the Web as another alternative to reach new and existing customers. We believe this technology and future developments, will stimulate cooperative efforts of customers, suppliers, and partners of the Web community to new heights.
w.h.holland@att.com
William H. Holland is a Technical Manager at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and he is part of the QUEST Computing Technology Center (CTC). He has responsibility for the AT&T Bell Laboratories External Gateway, Netnews, and Web Services. His team's main area of expertise is gateway design and gateway applications. His team also provides service development, provisioning, and consulting. He has 25 years with AT&T, and has held a wide variety of assignments. Some of his early accomplishments were hardware main memory design in the 1A and 3B2 processors, and software design in the 5ESS switch on the generic retrofit team. He later had network project leadership in the areas of AT&T Datakit [2] LAN/WAN, AT&T Starlan10, and gateway networks. He was also instrumental in developing the desktop computing services in the CTC. In his present job, his team is looking to develop and evolve the AT&T Web services. The main goal is to meet the needs of the AT&T business units, their customers, and the Internet community at large.
1. Firewalls and Internet Security, by William R. Cheswick and Steve M. Bellovin, dated, April 1994.